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How do people feel about national guilt. My tediously even-handed opinion is:

On the one hand- the apology obsession irritates me. "Oh, we can't get closure until Japan/the police/my brother/America/Britain apologises". Alternatively, you could grow up take responsibility for own emotions and start looking forward

On the other hand, to just wring your hands and say "well we ain't paying/positively discriminating/doing shit because it had nothing to do with us guv, it was my grandad" is to ignore the fact that in some cases, your cushy existence and present situation is largely thanks to x group of people and their shitty situation is partly thanks to your grandad's oppression/colonialisation/warmongering, so you are kind of settling the score a little.

You see, all those words and no solid position, just a bunch of grey-area observation that leaves us in the same position.

What do you mix of reasonable (read:useless) people, idiotic reactionary semi-trolls and studenty unrealistic naifs think?

(we have nothing to say Si, as you've been utterly non-specific and not said anything to polarise opinion)

Partly because in history we studied the many, many, many, many ways that Britain historically oppressed everyone they could find, so if I were to feel all that guilt I'd be crushed under the weight. And partly because watching stuff like The Wind That Shakes the Barley or Braveheart makes me feel like I'm being told off.

I would ask gimp-suit clad father to stop paying you 3am visits. More just interested in whether people were for/against say, the UK spending money on tribes/states/individuals that we may have stitched up/exploited/tortured

in commemoration of the suffering caused. But it's life isn't it; conflict is part of human nature and there will always be wars. What war in particular are we meant to feel sorry about? There's been loads, and every country has some amount of blood on their hands.

Remember, learn and move on, but guilt, nah, the time and effort could be spent looking for more conflict instead.

that being said, on the flip side of the coin I can't stand people who use what happened to their country etc... in the past for a reason justify behaviour.
For example: When I was i Uni I had to do a project with a group of girls. One of the girls was a young Jewish lass and another was a German girl. We were all 19. Anyway one Saturday we met at the German girl's house, on the way home the Jewish girl (who had sat quietly and contributed NOTHING the entire day) went on a massive rant saying she could stand being in that German house for all the horrid things German people did to her people. To put it in perspective, she was 19yrs old, her family were all South African and had never been to Germany, nor had any relatives who ever lived/came from Germany. She just used it as a reason for not wanting to work. She dropped out of the course a few months later.

Apartheid came into effect in 1948. There are very few people around today who could say they had a hand in making it legal (as in voting it into effect). Also, a lot of the really harsh laws were abolished by the time I was born - though there were still unfair white advantages which were prevalent. By the time I was in primary school we had fully integrated mixed race schools and there were no segregation laws really left in place. By 1994 it had all ended. I was 12. I absolutely agreed (and so did many of the white population) that affermative action was the correct way to give a fair advantage to the non-white races, who had been denied those rights in the past. However unfortunately a gross abuse of power happened where black politicians used a lot of the new laws to make a lot of money. (Selling themselves to be silent partners in businesses to up the black ownership ratios) In the end, the people who are still struggling and living in squaller, who were promised land and riches for their vote are in majority non-white people. And what's worse is the current Government would rather their constitutes to not vote at all - these are people whose families fought and died for that right. It's disgusting what's going on in South Africa. And the worst part is apartheid is used as the justification every time. I worked with a guy who did absolutely nothing, he smoked weed in the office, watched porn openly, would come in late and sleep and then when he was called up on it, he would say they were being racist and he would get away with it every time.

It's not like every British soldier who has fought in every colonial conflict was individually responsible - most of them had probably just joined the army so they could get regular food and pay. The decisions you're talking about, the ones some people think we should be ashamed of, were made by a very small number of people - a tiny proportion of the population - and the rest just had to go along with it.

The point made at the start is that Sweden was nuetral during the war and so many people would say blameless, but he points out the complicity in that; how Sweden was able to benefit from not having a generation wiped out by conflict or suffering financial difficulties by funding an army.

But it is worthwhile to just bear these things in mind. Like when people for instance subscribe to a narrative of 'advanced Western countries' on the one hand, and 'backwards countries' on the other. It is good to remember that the lifestyle we have in these Western countries in part comes at the expense of the 'backward countries' and therefore it is not a good idea to get too smug about it.